With the last release of iSub (2.2.x), I included a message to inform you when the Subsonic trial had expired. However, do to incorrect logic on my part when coding it, it is displayed whenever Subsonic does not return a song when asked, instead of only when a "donation required" response it sent.
So what does this mean? It means that if you are still within the 30 day trial, or you have already donated, then the message does NOT mean you have to donate again or that your Subsonic server became unregistered. Instead it should be read as "Song failed to play" rather than "Donation required". The content of the error message has been fixed for the upcoming iSub 2.3 update, however that doesn't address the underlying issue of why the message is actually being displayed in the first place.
So what can you do about it? The most common reason for the message to be displayed when you are already licensed, is when the transcoding plugins fail to convert a song. Transcoding covers two pieces of functionality in Subsonic: converting one file type to another and lowering the bitrate of a song.
They generally fail for two reasons:
1. The song you are trying to transcode has Asian characters in it (or other non standard characters). The current versions of the transcoding plugins used by Subsonic do not support certain non-standard characters, namely Asian language characters. Unfortunately, in this case there isn't much that can be done. If the songs are in MP3 format you can simply not enable bit rate limiting, or if they are in M4A format, you can turn off M4A > MP3 transcoding and they should play fine. iSub can read and display the song information and can play the songs, they are just not supported by Subsonic's transcoding plugins.
2. The transcoding plugins are not installed at all, or in the case of certain Windows installations and M4A files, a non-compatible version is installed.
Issues related to this should be fixed in the new version of Subsonic, 4.2, that is being prepared for release now. In Subsonic 4.1, the Mac OS X installer did not contain the transcoding plugins at all, and the Windows installer it seems includes a version of ffmpeg (the plugin used to convert M4A and other formats) that does not work with M4A files.
If you are using Subsonic 4.1 on Mac OS X, I have created a simple installer package to install the missing plugins. Simply double click to open the DMG (or Safari will open it automatically), then double click the installer package to run: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40866/Subsonic_ ... s_OS_X.dmg
If you are on Windows using Subsonic 4.1, you can download a set of working transcoding plugins here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40866/windows_t ... ORKING.zip Just unzip the file (usually just double click to open) and replace the files that you now have in c:\subsonic\transcode with these files.
Then make sure that the transcoding settings are correct in the Subsonic web interface. Log in and go to Settings > Transcoding and make sure it looks like this:
Also, just so you have something to copy and paste from, here are the transcoding settings in text form:
wav > mp3 step 1:
lame -b %b -S %s -
all other lines step 1:
ffmpeg -i %s -f wav -
all other lines step 2:
lame -b %b - -
So those are just the most common reasons for the donation message to be displayed. If you are receiving this error and it's not for these reasons, please email me at support@einsteinx2.com and we can troubleshoot the issue.
